Search Results for: lyric-philosophy

In this ground-breaking study on the nature of philosophy, Jan Zwicky demonstrates how much of potential philosophical significance is lost if our notion of meaningful language is constrained by narrow concepts of analytic rigour. Her aim is not to dismiss the role of analysis in philosophy; rather she strives to augment its resources and thereby give to philosophy a voice with greater range and integrity. Two parallel texts, on facing pages, run through the book. The primary one is Zwicky’s, which begins with a critique of existing criteria for defining a work as philosophy, and then develops the notion of lyric in its relation to two other key terms: technology and domesticity. She finishes with an exploration of meaning, form, and content in lyric contexts. The parallel text consists of quotations from other authors. It serves as commentary on, illustration of, and reaction to, the main text; as a way of acknowledging intellectual debts; and as a way of providing an historical context for some of the main text’s claims. Highly original in its thought and presentation, Zwicky’s discussion makes an exciting contribution to contemporary philosophy, forging new connections and expanding old boundaries.

The Everyday: Experiences, Concepts and Narratives is an inter-disciplinary book problematizing the slippery notion of 'Everyday Life'. Contributing to a tradition of 20th century scholarly work focusing on 'Everyday Life', this book specifically attends to the multiple ways that the quotidian aspects of our day-to-day existence become knotted into situated narratives and concepts. In their depth and breadth, the chapters compiled here all work with an understanding of everyday life that is i...

Alkibiades, a central character in Plato's Symposium, claims that philosophy touches him to the quick. When Socrates speaks, he's often moved to tears and realizes he must change his life. In Alkibiades' Love, Jan Zwicky demonstrates that this image of philosophy is not anachronistic, but remains the living heart of the discipline. Philosophy can indeed matter to our lives, but for it to do so, we must reconceive the methods that, since the Enlightenment, have dominated its self-image in the West. In these meticulously researched essays, Zwicky argues that analytic and poststructuralist philosophy are not simply fashions in academic discourse, but are manifestations of the technocracy which they sustain and promote. The alternative she develops, by showing it in action, is lyric philosophy - an integrated mode of understanding whose foundations lie in the way we comprehend music and metaphor. Written in lucid and powerful prose, Alkibiades' Love will interest a broad readership, from students of ancient Greek philosophy to ecologists seeking a coherent foundation for their work. Zwicky offers deep and original readings of Freud, Plato, and Simone Weil, and resuscitates Max Wertheimer's work, linking it to our comprehension of mathematics, metaphor, and ecological structures. Zwicky has been hailed as one of the most important and original thinkers of our time. Alkibiades' Love illuminates and extends her groundbreaking work while providing an accessible introduction for those coming to her thought for the first time.

In recent years philosophers have produced important books on nearly all the major arts: the novel and painting, music and theatre, dance and architecture, conceptual art and even gardening. Poetry is the sole exception. This is an astonishing omission, one this collection of original essays will correct. If contemporary philosophy still regards metaphors such as 'Juliet is the sun' as a serious problem, one has an acute sense of how prepared it is to make philosophical and aesthetic sense of poems such W. B. Yeats's 'The Second Coming', Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy', or Paul Celan's 'Todesfuge'. The Philosophy of Poetry brings together philosophers of art, language, and mind to expose and address the array of problems poetry raises for philosophy. In doing so it lays the foundation for a proper philosophy of poetry, setting out the various puzzles and paradoxes that future work in the field will have to address. Given its breadth of approach, the volume is relevant not only to aesthetics but to all areas of philosophy concerned with meaning, truth, and the communicative and expressive powers of language more generally. Poetry is the last unexplored frontier in contemporary analytic aesthetics, and this volume offers a powerful demonstration of how central poetry should be to philosophy.

What would you have if you had the p layful intricacy of Mozart, the intultive rigour of Wittgenstein, and John Muir'slove of the earth? You would have the poetry of Jan Zwicky---Roo Borson In Lyric Ecology editor's Mark Dicknson and Clare Goulet have assembled a marvelous set of mediations' on the work of the unique poet philosopher and intellectual pioneer Jan Zwicky, Trained as an analytic philosopher and a brilliant Wittgenstenian Zwicky as the poet's ability to question her own assertions at every step showing us that everything we see could also be otherswise. In keeping with the spirit of difference and complexity tht is Zwicky's the contributors chosen come from a wide variety of fields and positions and their essays offer brilliant insights into Zwicky's oeuvre as well as into the larger question, what is a poetics today and how does it relate to philosophy, to anthropology and to the life sciences? A genuinely, provocative and timely book.---Marjorie Perloff author of Wittgenstein's Ladder Poetic language and the Strangenes of the Ordinary; Professor of merita of English and Comparative Literature Stanford University Where of one cannot speak there of one must be silent or so we have heard. Perhaps however, there are ways of spekaing that do not break the silence, but rather invite the silence itself to come to voice. Jan Zwicky is an exquisite poet-philosopher with a classical musician's feel for the rhythm and melody through her as she thinks and dreams. Her pellucid craft has nourished wordsmiths in many fields: some of their voices conjoin in this wonderful book tatisman of earthly intelligence.---David Abram, author of the Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal. "The gift of lyric is to see the whole in the particular; and in so doing, to bring the preciousness, which is the losability, of the world, into clear focus." So says Jan Zwicky, a musician, philosopher, and poet whose eleven books redefine thinking as not only reasoned analysis but perception, remembering, astonishment, emotion, the connection of this to that. In doing so, they remind us how the play of thought is central to being human. These works have lifted her to the heights of several fields. In a single year she was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Awards in two categories: non-fiction (philosophy) for Wisdom & Metaphor and poetry for Robinson's Crossing. She received the award in 1999 for Songs for Relinquishing the Earth. Her seminal Lyric Philosophy (1992) has just been released in a new edition (2010), and her influence on Canadian philosophy is immense. Lyric Ecology: An Appreciation of the Work of Jan Zwicky is the first formal measure of her work and a testament to her influence. With original contributions from poets, musicians, philosophers, and colleagues, this collection illuminates many particular angles in the unique geometry of her thought. New readers and old will be amazed by the grace and clarity of her thinking

''The problem of Transcendence is the problem of our time. " I Needless to say, Transcendence was a particularly lively i~sue when Karl Heim wrote these words in the mid-1930's. Within the province of philosophi cal theology and philosophy of religion, however, it is always the prob lem, as Gordon Kaufman has recently reminded us. 2Por the question concerning the nature and the reality of Transcendence has not only to do with self-transcendence, but with the being of Transcendence-Itself, that is to say, with the nature and the reality of God as experienced and understood at any given time or place. Now there are those today who would claim that any further discus sion of the latter half of this proposition, namely,Transcendence-Itse1f or God, is worthless and quite beside the point. Such persons would claim that the particular logia represented by the theological sciences has collapsed by virtue of its object having disappeared. Indeed, when one surveys the contemporary scene in philosophy and theology, there is a good deal of evidence that this is the case':"" theology of late having be come something of a "spectacle," to use Pritz Buri's term. One of the reasons for this, we here contend, is that the richness and the diversity of the meaning of Transcendence has been lost. And even though we do not here intend to resolve the issue, neither do we assume that such an enqui ry is either impossible or irrelevant.

In the foreword to Wisdom & Metaphor, Jan Zwicky observes that “those who think metaphorically are enabled to think truly, because the shape of their thinking echoes the shape of the world.” Wisdom & Metaphor explores the ways we come to understand the world through analogical structures, and the relation of this form of knowing to conventional epistemology and ontology. Zwicky uses the nature of the book itself, with its facing pages, to create resonant structures of aphorism and quotation which allow the reader to experience the kind of thinking she describes. The author’s wide-ranging influences, coupled with an understated, largely spatial, style of discourse, make this a remarkably original approach to long-standing questions about meaning and language. It offers a unique and compelling argument for the fundamental importance of metaphor to philosophy.

This volume presents eleven new essays that reveal how significant nineteenth-and twentieth-century writers have drawn from, and in some cases, opposed major trends in philosophy. Essays in this collection deal with Tennyson, Coleridge, Woolf, Faulkner, De Quincey, Beckett, romance as a genre, the state of contemporary literary theory as shaped by the writings of Wittgenstein, Ricoeur and Derrida, and other topics.

With the great merit of Aristotle's Poetics , poetic logic became a theoretical activity endowed with a philosophical nature allowing it to be more philosophical than the pure representation of existence. Today, however, the theoretical status of poetic logic has been greatly demoted. The Angel's Corpse restores to poetic logic (or lyric philosophy) the cognitive and epistemological significance attributed to it by Aristotle. The Angel's corpse (the central metaphor in this restoration) is a sign-post beyond which there exists an uncharted terrain of human signification. This terrain is expressed in terms of lyric philosophy and its universal trait is a shocking into reawakening, which is linked to the dissolution of the repetitive logic of history. With this book, Colilli aims to bring to life the traits that are close to the Angel and which amount to a new philosophy of culture and interpretation. This philosophy is free from the ideological burden of previous systems, but pivots its cognito-epistemological premises on the idea of reawakening.

Arcing across thirty years and seven volumes, Jan Zwicky’s poetry has always been acutely musical (and sensitive to the silence out of which music comes). In the compositions in Chamber Music, the first anthology of Zwicky’s poems, one may perceive the attunement of her vocations: poet, philosopher, violinist. Her poetry both praises and relinquishes the earth, bearing witness to the fierce skies of the prairies and the freezing rain of the West Coast. Enacting the virtue of clarity prized and defended by her explicitly philosophical work, this poetry is both resonant and integrated. It is also formally diverse, ranging from the singular focus of the lyric ode to suites of variations and fugal structures, from polyphonic textures to the sprawling reach of narrative gestures. Throughout, one feels the deft hand of an adept using powerful metaphors to explore themes of colonial violence, environmental devastation, spiritual catastrophe, and transformation. Resisting Western philosophy’s exclusion of imagination from civic life, Zwicky’s poetry is noteworthy for the tension it achieves between the abstract and the personal, the general and the particular. Meditating repeatedly on themes of love and grief, this poetry is at once passionately committed to the lucidity of its utterances and the fidelity of its images.

Collected here for the first time are all of Dante's "minor" works, ranging from a semi-autobiographical treatise on poets and affective philosophy (the Vita nuova) to an essay in language and literary aesthetics (the De vulgari eloquentia). Together, the writings illuminate the poet's unparalleled imaginative power and unmistakable spiritual energy, and provide insight into his place in romance literature.

Chinese philosophy specialists examine the Zhuangzi, a third century B.C.E. Daoist classic, in this collection of interpretive essays. The Zhuangzi is a celebration of human creativity -- its language is lucid and opaque; its images are darkly brilliant; its ideas are playful. Without question, it is one of the most challenging achievements of human literary culture. Thematically, the Zhuangzi offers diverse insights into how to develop an appropriate and productive attitude to one's life in this world. Resourced over the centuries by Chinese artists and intellectuals alike, this text has provoked a commentarial tradition that rivals any masterpiece of world literature. Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi continues the interpretive tradition as Western scholars shed light on selected passages from the difficult text, offering the needed mediation between available translations of the Zhuangzi and the reader's process of understanding. Taken as a whole, this anthology is a primer on how to read the Zhuangzi.

Renaissance images could be real as well as linguistic. Human beings were often believed to be an image of the cosmos, and the sun an image of God. Kathryn Banks explores the implications of this for poetic language and argues that linguistic images were a powerful tool for rethinking cosmic conceptions. She reassesses the role of natural-philosophical poetry in France, focusing upon its most well-known and widely-read exponent, Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas. Through a sustained analysis of Maurice Sceve's Delie, Banks also rethinks love lyric's oft-noted use of the beloved as image of the poet. Cosmos and Image makes an original contribution to our understanding of Renaissance thinking about the cosmic, the human, and the divine. It also proposes a mode of reading other Renaissance texts, and reflects at length upon the relation of 'literature' to history, to the history of science, and to political turmoil.